Sonoma County, California — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Main Adult Detention Facility (MADF); North County Detention Facility (NCDF)

Operated bySonoma County Sheriff's Office — Detention Division
County publishes a jail nameYes — both facilities are named and described on the Sheriff's Facilities page
MADF address2777 Ventura Avenue, Santa Rosa (Hall of Justice Complex)
NCDF address2254 Ordinance Road, Santa Rosa (5 miles north of Santa Rosa, adjacent to Charles M. Schulz Airport)
Detention Division staffing as publishedOver 300 employees
NCDF site15.3 acres — 9.62 acres facility, 5.91 acres Agriculture Program
Rated capacity1,409 beds across 2 facilities

Source: Sonoma County Sheriff's Office — Facilities · checked 2026-08-23

Transparency rating

8/10Open

✓The jail is named
✓Who is in custody
✓Beds and daily population
✓What it costs taxpayers
✓Deaths in custody
✓PREA audits
✓Independent inspection
✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
✗How to post bond — not published
✓Phone, video and commissary rates

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Sonoma County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-08-23. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

The Building

You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.

Year builtMADF opened 1991; NCDF site became a 35-bed honor farm in 1967
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
BedsMADF originally designed for close to 500; total MADF capacity given as 1,473 in 2018. NCDF grew to a rated capacity of 559 before 172 inmates were moved to MADF in April 1997.

Since then

1997 — MADF expansion opened, adding 290 beds

The Sheriff

Sheriff Eddie Engram

Title as publishedSheriff-Coroner (site header reads 'Sheriff Coroner Eddie Engram')
Also serves asCounty Coroner — the Coroner Bureau is a bureau of the Sheriff's Office
Coroner Bureau pagehttps://www.sonomasheriff.org/about-coroner-unit
Career note as publishedJoined the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office in 2002; previously a correctional officer with the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: Sonoma County Sheriff's Office — Sheriff Coroner Eddie Engram · checked 2026-08-23

The Judges

Multi-judge court; per the brief only the Presiding Judge and Assistant Presiding Judge are listed by name, plus the two Superior Court Commissioners identified on the published judicial assignments page. The assignments page shows Judge Averill on the misdemeanor calendar; it does not label any single courtroom as the bail-setting calendar.

Superior Court of California, County of Sonoma — Presiding Judge

Christopher Honigsberg

Superior Court of California, County of Sonoma — Assistant Presiding Judge

Shelly J. Averill

Superior Court Commissioners (arraignment, misdemeanor and support calendars)

Rosie Takhar-Dhillon
Megan Amaral

Still needed

The county's bond schedule
Share of the jail population held pretrial
Median time from booking to first appearance

Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-23

The County Commissioners

They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.

What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
The boardBoard of County Commissioners →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

Capacity is marked yes because the Sheriff publishes facility capacity figures on the Facilities page and the county publishes Jail Population Data on its open data portal (https://data.sonomacounty.ca.gov/Public-Safety/Jail-Population-Data/gemb-q4p5).
Fees: the Jail Tablets page publishes the ViaPath rate card effective April 1, 2025 — remote video visitation $0.12/minute, 30-second video message $1.00, 60-second video message $2.50, written message $0.25 each, photo attachment $0.25 each. Voice call rates are not published.
PREA: the Sheriff posts annual PREA reports going back to 2013, not third-party PREA audit reports.
Inspections: the Facility Inspections page posts BSCC inspection summary letters (April 3 2024, June 10 2024, May 6 2025) and links to the BSCC report repository.
Contracts: all 120 crawlable pages of sonomasheriff.org were searched; no contract or per-diem rate page to hold other agencies' prisoners was found.
Bail: all 120 crawlable pages of sonomasheriff.org were searched for 'bail' and 'bond'; the only hits are historical narrative and a domestic-violence advisory. No guidance on how to post bail was found.
Budget: the Sheriff's own budget page (https://www.sonomasheriff.org/budget-fy2021) covers only proposed FY 2020-21 cuts; the current detention budget appears inside the county's adopted budget books.
Five-member Board of Supervisors, elected by district.

What California law requires

Sonoma County posts a death-in-custody page.

Posts 7 of 7

The page is here. A standing page titled 'AB2761' embeds a table hosted at https://data.sonomasheriff.org/apps/custodydeaths with columns Date, Agency, County, Facility, Death Location, Race, Gender, Age, Custodial Status, Manner and Means — all seven statutory elements as separate fields. Four deaths are listed (9/11/2023, 9/13/2023, 1/7/2024, 5/1/2024) and the full text of Penal Code section 10008 is reproduced beneath the table in English and Spanish.

✓The agency with custodial responsibility
✓The county where the death occurred
✓The facility — and where inside it
✓Race, gender and age
✓The date of death
✓Custodial status — awaiting arraignment, awaiting trial, or incarcerated
✓Manner and means of death

California Penal Code § 10008, enacted by AB 2761 and in force since January 2023, requires the agency with custodial responsibility to post these seven items on its own website within ten days of a death in custody, and to update them within thirty days if the facts change. California is the only state in the country with this duty. Checked 2026-08-23. This records what is published, nothing more.

The record

14 people have died in the Sonoma County jail since 2017.

3 by suicide

5 illness or medical

14 deaths in all, 2016 onward

Deaths where the person had not been convicted of the charge holding them11 of 14

Most recent death on the state's record2024-05-01

Deaths: Texas Justice Initiative, the cleaned copy of the Texas Attorney General’s custodial death reports — the state’s own public index carries no cause of death and has not been refreshed since August 2025. Population: Texas Commission on Jail Standards monthly report. Counted, not estimated.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Sonoma County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).

How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?

Your VOTE is POWERFUL.

The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.

The sheriff is on your ballot

The county elections office runs the polling place in Sonoma County and prints the ballot the sheriff’s name is on. Links from the California Secretary of State and vote.gov.

Names verified 2026-08-23 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered